Nearly Half of U.S. 'Net Users Post Content 264
An anonymous reader copies and pastes: "WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nearly half of U.S. Internet users have built Web pages, posted photos, written comments or otherwise added to the enormous variety of material available online, according to a report released on Sunday. The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that about 44 percent of the country's Internet users have created content for others to enjoy online." Don't read the blurb - cut straight to the study.
The real question... (Score:3, Insightful)
Heartwarming (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted, there's a lot of worthess content out there, but I'd take a truly democratic system over an overly controlled one any day.
Slashdot is a bad example. (Score:5, Insightful)
Personal Home Pages (Score:5, Insightful)
Thus far I have found one (1) use for these pages: finding the email address for someone. Unfortunately, lately because of the spam pandemic, even that function is dissapearing since people don't want to out their email addresses to public internet.
Personally I think that when I have become interesting enough to have a personal homepage, someone else will do it for me :)
Telephone sampling (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The real question... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The real question... (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when do we need to place a value on individual expression?
Re:1/2 post, less than 1% quality (Score:5, Insightful)
All those attributes are largely in the eye of the beholder.
I think it's too often stated that the net "democratizes". The true beauty of the net is that it pluralizes. even if there are only a few hundred agitors scattered across an oppressed country - or for that matter, only a couple dozen globally-dispersed teenagers who obsess over geri ryan's ass - they can communicate, discuss, and get community critique of their otherwise lonely and isolated ideas.
So to answer your question - a LOT of it is "useful, easy to read, and informative" - to its target audience.
For some it's more than just casual interest. (Score:4, Insightful)
At least for me, it's been almost a way of life since about 1997, and how I've been eeking out something of a living for the last half year or so (and less of a living before losing my job and car and having to work on the net fulltime).
And 99% of it is crap (Score:5, Insightful)
Buying a copy of word and sitting down and typing isnt going to make you a writer
Buying a copy of dreamweaver (or shudder front page) isnt going to make you a web designer. People do things on the web that they would never do in their front yard. How many of you have seen those garish sites that make you want to cry, or your eyes bleed? People have forgotten that the web is a PUBLIC space, it is one giant central park.
Just because you can do something dosen't mean you should, and people posting on the web need to remember this!
And yet broadband providers CRIPPLE us. (Score:4, Insightful)
unfortunately the promise of commercial-free, user-created content is ruthlessly stymied by broadband providers' policies forbidding Joe Schmoe User from setting up his own servers, and by gutting upload speeds to pathetically low rates of transfer.
welcome to the "you-are-a-docile-receptive-sheep" consumer media ghetto.
Re:1/2 post, less than 1% quality (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:1/2 post, less than 1% quality (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Personal Home Pages (Score:3, Insightful)
It has been suggested that there ought to be a law forbidding poets from giving public readings of their own works.
The principle is basically the same.
KFG
Re:The real question... (Score:3, Insightful)
WHAT content? (Score:5, Insightful)
2) Maybe that's better... Anyway... Great most of the content is junk that makes finding "true gems" even harder. (webforum blurbs, webpages which repeat the same stolen articles and photos 1000's times, flames, unanswered questions and clueless answers to mailing lists, misleading links, fake keywords... finding something new, creative and useful is getting gradually harder, not easier because of this "richness")
Re:1/2 post, less than 1% quality (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not sure that the 800k user ids given out has much to do with the number of active users.
Although the editors have done a lot to try and remove the game aspects of Slashdot it is still a game to plenty of people. At least some trolls have extra accounts to mod themselves up and modbomb their enemies. People friend whore, foe whore, and reply whore - and shill accounts are useful for all those activities.
Re:Personal Home Pages (Score:5, Insightful)
That's OK. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Where, not how much! (Score:4, Insightful)
Not necessarily. For material which you don't intend for people to find via search engines, it's entirely appropriate.
For example, if you've got a web page about some software you've written, and you've got a tarball linked from that page, you probably want Google to point people towards the page, not the tarball. Saying that the tarball is <a href="foo.tar.gz">here</a> reduces the chance that the tarball will appear inappropriately as a search result.
Re:And 99% of it is crap (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is, anyone can put stuff up and I think should be encouraged. It's not like this weighs the internet down and slows it down for the rest of us, at least as far as i know, but it instead adds another node of possible information. I don't know how many times I have received some sort of small snippet of useful information from someone's homepage or description or information of a personal hobby.
I also wish sometimes that people would post more of their stuff into the sort of "public domain" that the internet creates. If I had time and bandwidth to spare, I would post sites that explain the simple steps of how to get started into projects or hobbies or school assignments that I have done or quick explanations that bridge those gaps left by hardcore enthusiasts who have whole webrings devoted to the advanced topics of some hobby, but no one gives a good introduction helpers to the basic beginner, amerateur (I mangled that spelling.) things to do or know. Like what was your first few weeks of learning directly after you discovered this thing's existance? **cough**linux**cough** What do all those damned abbreviations stand for or where did that weird nonsensical name come from? How does this compare to other options? We all have to relearn this and then after the frustration and steep learning curve, we never go back and try and make that easier for others, lessen the learning curve.
Yes there's a lot of crap websites out there, but what do you care? A) no one is forcing you to look at it and B) it doesn't slow down or bog the internet or take up precious space (although IP addresses could be argued) because it creates its own space to exist in as soon as it goes up. The internet is one of the most free open things in existance.
Crap is an inevitability in free/openness and is a good sign that it still is a free and open system. Embrace it.
Re:And yet broadband providers CRIPPLE us. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm impressed that considering I have been a member for years they continue to offer more and more services, many of them are free! So maybe you're wrong on the last part, I hope so at least.
Re:Where, not how much! (Score:4, Insightful)
You lost me there... how, exactly, was the old system better? I know precisely where to go for "the usual things", like stock quotes, weather, news, etc. A portal is of no value beyond a cursory introduction to the 'net, and that's why the guys like excite, yahoo, etc are dead/dying. What google helps me find is the gold that could never be traced out by manuallly maintained indexes that I might frequent.
I agree with you that widespread dependence on google is a bit frightening, but the worst we'd end up with if google disappeared (or lost credibility) is what we had before, which was basically jack shit.
Re:1/2 post, less than 1% quality (Score:5, Insightful)
Too bad he'll never see your reply.
Re:1/2 post, less than 1% quality (Score:5, Insightful)
You'got a very good point.
I think that Andy Warhol's "15 minutes of fame" may be wrong. Actually, anyone of us can be famous to 15 other persons instead. All it takes is to set up a decent website and fill it with content that in some way feels important to oneself.
I run a Norwegian website called Solumslekt [solumslekt.org] with a fairly big genealogy database (yes, I'm in the "senior" group), and in a couple of years I've gathered quite a group of attenders who are hanging around on the discussion forum.
For more than 99% of the Web audience my site is probably worthless, but among the few who share my interests, I've earned myself some good reputation.
I pay the equivalent of twenty bucks a month for professional web hosting, and I think it's worth it. Writing a book isn't my idea of fun, and most genealogy books don't return the investment anyway. It's so much easier to publish on the web.
Re:1/2 post, less than 1% quality (Score:5, Insightful)
So millions and millions of people post content, but how much is useful, easy to read, and informative? Probably less than one percent.
You might as well ask what percentage of information transported over the telephone is useful, easy to read and informative? Who cares? People are communicating with other people and the quality of the communication is (as another poster said) in the eye of the beholder. A dump of pictures from my wedding is probably dreck to you but interesting to my mother in law.
This study is important! (Score:4, Insightful)
The other view of the Internet, as a nautral place where people meet and exhcange ideas and thoughts, has survived from the days it was an academic network.
Some of us have always thought this is what the Internet should be, and what the part of the net that is interesting still is, and it is nice to have numbers that back up this view.
The Internet is not and should not be just another broadcast medium for predigested entertainment like TV.
also.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And yet broadband providers CRIPPLE us. (Score:2, Insightful)
They want you to consume, and consume alone. Being a content provider puts you in competition with them.
Re:The real question... (Score:5, Insightful)
A double edged question--From an individual perspective, we need to strive to find that information that is meaningful to us. That is we all have to filter out the tripe.
From a system's perspective, I think Google has the right approach, the system should just gather and try to index the information in a usable manner and let the individual make their choice.
The main things that google needs to look for are data structures that are clearly misleading like pages typed up by bots.
Re:1/2 post, less than 1% quality (Score:5, Insightful)
Diaries of unknown people are unlikely to be usefull to anyone except historians. Why would knowing about my day to day life be usefull to you ?
To make actually usefull content, like games, stories, pictures or music, requires some actual effort. Blogs and diarys can be entertaining, but they are unlikely to be usefull.
Re:Pruning for the public good? (Score:2, Insightful)
So you must've been pretty annoyed about goatse.
Seriously, what about child porn and other illegal content? Shouldn't it be deleted?
The biggest problem is getting to it. (Score:5, Insightful)
What do I mean by net-sphere? The list of sites one visits daily, or regularly, for news/updates, etc. Apart from google queries, one rarely goes outside this net-sphere
For example, I visit a list of 5 sites daily. And when I'm done with those sites, I rarely visit any others, willingly, unless I happen to randomly come across something new that interests me.
It frustrates me to know end, knowing as I do at the end of my '5 site browse session' that there are probably at least 7 or 8 other sites out there which would interest me, and which would hold my interest, and which I would add to my list of 'net-sphere' sites... only how do I find them?
It'd be nice to have a site where I could go, plug in my 5 favourite (most-visited) sites, and get a list of recommendations for other sites to peruse/visit. I know sites like that exist
Search engines only solve the search for things you know you want to look for
I'd happily subscribe to a list of 'cool sites to look out for', if I could, say, plug in answers to a ton of questions about the things I like, and if that service was smart enough to find me sites that were really interesting to me, I'd use it more often.
Content isn't the problem. Finding the content is still a problem, google-success aside. (Hey, I like google, but search engines don't fill the entire need...)
If anyone has recommendations for cool, regularly (daily) updated sites on the subject of technology, music, music technology, gadgets, meeting real nerd chicks online, and travel tips for Europe, I'd sure like to know them.
Re:Heartwarming (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Slashdot is a bad example. (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that a particular webboard or newsgroup on, say, migration patterns of the Canadian yellowtail finch, is of no interest whatsoever to all but a few Internet users, is not a failure of the Internet... the fact that the 2 or 3 people (probably from different countries) who are interested in this subject have a place to discuss it, makes it a success! I think that counting the number of people interested in a particular bit of Web content, makes an exceedingly poor measure of its quality. The Internet is an incredible rich source of information. Despite the fact that almost no one cares one bit about the yellowtail finch, there will be some information on it somewhere, should you ever need it. In that case... judge the quality of the information on its accuracy, not on the number of people it appeals to.
Re:Seems low. (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And 99% of it is crap (Score:2, Insightful)
As a wise man once said (Score:5, Insightful)
The worst thing about the Internet is that it means everybody can publish.
Re:1/2 post, less than 1% quality (Score:3, Insightful)
Free Expression Is Great (Score:5, Insightful)
I keep a website. It's not a blog. It's just a
What an amazing world we live in!
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Forty-Four Percent... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Slashdot is a bad example. (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, it might be there. Google has no reference to "Canadian yellowtail finch". :)
Trolling (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:WRONG (Score:1, Insightful)
I see all kind of people lulled into a false sense of security by the "tools" thinking that they (the tools) make them something that they arent. And here is the nail in the coffin...
1) Get out word (yes I know MS but that is what ever one who is posting is using)
2) Find a poem by e.e. cummings
3) Put poem by e.e. cummings into word
4) let word correct the poem
The product isnt going to be cummings. I would have to ask would cummings produce the work he did with "modern" tools? I would like to think (hope) so, but what are these tools doing to REAL creativity?
Re:The real question... (Score:3, Insightful)
The real question is, how much of the content is even worth existing?
One way of answering this is to look at the costs vs the benefits. The internet has reduced the costs of worldwide publishing to nearly zero for a lot of people. So even if the benefits of publishing one's stuff are also so near to zero as to make no difference, it is often still worth doing.
If you are going to write a journal or put together a photo album anyway, the cost of pubishing the results on the web is insignificant compared to the work you are already putting into your project. Which means it can be worth the small extra effort to publish even if the benefits also seem insignificant. After all, we are talking about a cost equivalent to the effort a butterfly puts into a single flap of its wings... who knows what might come of it?
It is true that the internet has changed what was once thought to be a natural law, that
This has now become
So what?
As long as there is Google, Yahoo and other good search engines out there, does it make a difference whether I'm ignoring 99.99% of the web, or 99.9999% of the web? As a web user, the cost to me is the same no matter how much dross is out there.
And of course what is b_llsh!t for a billion people might spark an enlightening insight in someone else.
[note on statistics] 97.3% of all statistics are made up on the spot-- A. Woodhull, PH.D.
Re:And yet broadband providers CRIPPLE us. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Slashdot is a bad example. (Score:2, Insightful)
In practice, one man's valuable stuff to share is another man's garbage polluting the search engines. And some topics are already polluted to death by other men's and women's garbage.
E.g., try searching some something about weapons sometimes. Let's say I'm Joe Average, I just saw a movie where Rambo shoots half an hour straight without changing an AK-47 clip, and I got in an argument with a guest as to whether that's even possible. So all I want to know is "what's the clip capacity and rate of fire on an AK-47".
Because I'm Joe Average, let's further assume that I don't even know what AK-47 stands for, nor already what's Kalashnikov's web site. So I just start searching for "AK-47", "AK-47 clip" and such.
Should be an easy search, right? Wrong.
What you'll get is a million retarded Counter-Strike clan sites, clan bulletin boards, etc. Places where 12 year olds try to outdo their l337 clan members on bragging about how l33t they're with an AK-47, or whining about how the AK-47 sucks. In between just acting like a retard, because apparently that's how you get prestige and respect in about 99% of the clans.
Their valuable information to share is my worthless garbage. I just want a search engine which can filter that garbage out, because it's killing any chance of finding what I really want.
Or try searching something about politics. Chances are 50-50 that you'll land in a maze of whiny blogs, all alike. And all linking to each other.
Again, that may be valuable information to share for them, but for me it's just garbage. Can someone please have mercy and give me a "no blogs" checkbox on the search page?
And then come the "Mr Individualism". The ones so full of themselves, that they actually believe their crap is so important that _everyone_ must see it. Just because it's theirs, it _must_ be important. The ones who actually _want_ their garbage shoved down my throat, whether I want it or not. In fact, _especially_ if I don't want it.
Some of them will even pay money to "Search Engine Optimization Consultants", to make sure that I'll see their garbage right at the top. That as many of my searches as possible are polluted with that crap. Well, gee. Thanks.
Some are companies, some are the bloggers mentioned above.
So basically I'm not necessarily against all that stuff being posted, but I'd sure like some better search engines. Because as it is, more and more topics are burried in garbage. And my time is too valuable to spend hours of it adding 500 words that must _not_ be contained in the result, so I might have a chance to find what I'm looking for.
Re:Slashdot is a bad example. (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe what's really needed is not "better" search engines, but better input parameter *guidance* for regular Joe Users. More "did you mean to search for...??" (akin to Google's spellcheck function) might be a start, progressing to "did you mean to include/exclude [some large class of results]??"